Instant noodles are produced by gelatinizing cut raw noodle strings and then drying the noodle strings by frying, hot-air drying, freeze dry, or the like. The instant noodles can be reconstituted and easily eaten only by pouring boiling water and leaving the noodles for about three to five minutes or by boiling and cooking the noodles for about one to three minutes. Thus, the instant noodles are extremely convenient instant foods.
However, thick noodle strings are not easily reconstituted. The thick noodles are not reconstituted only by pouring the boiling water and leaving the noodles for three to five minutes, and cores of the noodles remain uncooked. Therefore, it is necessary to reduce the thickness of the noodle. On this account, even if the noodles are thick, the thickness thereof after the reconstitution is about 1.4 mm at most, and the shapes thereof are flat noodle shapes. Thus, he/she cannot fully enjoy the smooth feeling of noodles passing through his/her throat. Here, there is a need for a technology of being able to reconstitute thicker noodles in boiling water.
In addition, if the reconstitution property of thin noodle strings is improved, the wait time before eating can be further shortened. A technology of improving the reconstitution in boiling water is useful also for the instant noodles of thin noodle strings. As above, the improvement of the reconstitution property of the instant noodles is an extremely important problem in the instant noodle technology, and an extremely large number of technologies for solving this problem are known.
Although there are a large number of conventional technologies, actually, the instant noodles eaten by pouring the boiling water, even the thick fried noodles, each has a width of about 5.0 mm and a thickness of about 1.4 mm when reconstituted, that is, is thin and is in the flat noodle shape. This indicates that: effects of these conventional technologies are not enough; or even if the improvement effect of the reconstitution property is obtained, taste and texture are adversely affected, and these conventional technologies have limitations.
Under these circumstances, the present inventors have diligently studied to develop a technology in which even thicker instant noodles than before can be eaten by pouring the boiling water, and noodle quality and the like are not adversely affected. As a result, the present inventors have found that the reconstitution property dramatically improves by extremely strongly rolling out a noodle belt in a noodle belt rolling step of a noodle making step and spraying superheated steam to the obtained raw noodle strings. Thus, the present invention was made.
One example of conventional technologies in which the extremely strong rolling is performed in an instant noodle producing step is PTL 1, and examples of conventional technologies in which the raw noodle strings are subjected to the superheated steam are PTLs 2 to 5.
Although each of these conventional technologies describes the effects, such as “good reconstitution property”, “shortening of time for reconstitution in boiling water”, and the like, the level of improvement of the reconstitution property is much lower than a target level of the present invention.